<TITLE>ADVANCED TOPICS -- CONCISE USER GUIDE</TITLE>
<H1>ADVANCED TOPICS</H1>
<H2>Multiple Commands</H2>The `index' and `find' commands return a list. If you want to apply
some command to each of the items on the list, then you can use the
extension `+'. For example, suppose there are twelve items under the
/COSINE/specs item, and you want to perform the `overview' command
on them all, then you can use the `index' command to get the list,
and the extension `+ overview' to get the overview of each of them.
This is a lot easier than sending a `goto' and an `overview' twelve
times. Try sending the following commands:
<XMP>
			start
			goto /COSINE/specs
			index + overview

</XMP>You will be sent a message with an overview of each of the items under
/COSINE/specs.
<H2>Limiting the Size of the Result</H2>Some mail systems are not capable of handling large messages. If you
are using one of these systems, you may find that when you get a large
file back from CONCISE something goes wrong. If you find that there
is a problem with large files, you can limit the size of the returned
result by using the `max-size' command. For example, to limit the
size of a returned message to 150000 characters (about 2000 lines)
use the following command at the beginning of your message:
<XMP>
			start
			max-size 150000

</XMP>The result will be sent back in a series of messages, each of which
is no bigger than 150000 characters.
<H2>Personal reminders</H2>If you store the commands that you send to the CONCISE service, you
may wish to annotate them with your own comments, in order to remind
you what it is for. (This is analogous to putting comments into a
computer program.) This can be done by putting `//' at the begining
of a line. All subsequent text on the line will be ignored by CONCISE
but may be useful to you eg.
<XMP>
	start
	// CONCISE commands to return indexes of the top three levels
	// This may return a large file as a result.
	
	top
	max-size 500000
	index + index + index



